One More Look at Jesus

Last year, I spent most of my devotional time in the Gospels asking the question, "If Jesus is the expressed image of the living God, how did He treat people?" Some might think this an irrelevant question but for me it drives to the very heart of the contemporary discussion on the doctrine of salvation and the extent of God's desire to save.

The result was a paper I delivered at last year 's Evangelical Theological Society in San Francisco entitled," Seeing the Father in the face of the Son." I built the study on Jesus' words in John 14:9," He who has seen Me has seen the Father." One presupposition that played into the conclusion was that Jesus demonstrated graphically exactly how the Father relates to individuals. I looked at the way Jesus related to people and concluded the Father relates to people in the same way.

This year I returned again to study the Gospels and added Acts as well. This year's question, to put it succinctly, was," Jesus, why did You come?" Specifically, "what was Your purpose in coming to this earth in the Incarnation?" I knew some of the reasons like Luke 19:10,"For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." I actually only thought I would discover a dozen or so answers to the question. Yet, upon reading the Scriptures slowly and deliberately, I was surprised to discover over one hundred answers to this nuanced question. One principal conclusion that I have walked away with is that it is God's intention for each of us to look at all of life through the lens of our relationship to Jesus Christ.

It is true that when a person in childlike faith prays to receive Christ (John 1:12), they are transformed in a moment into a child of God. With this, however, comes God's intention that every purpose of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is to be pursued and lived out. It is a life imparted to us with the expectation that ours will be an ever increasing conformity to our Master. We are to reflect Paul's declaration as our aspiration that "it is Christ in you [which is] your hope of glory," with the end that we might be "complete in Christ" (Col.1:27b,28b).

How will you live out God's purpose for you today?